Song of the Day 9/24: Adriano Celentano, “Prisencolinensinainciusol”

Trump confused the United Nations with Nürnberg yesterday, and most of the audience sat stone-faced through his disquisition. My guess is the translators went on a wildcat strike and refused to accurately convey Trump’s stream of insults and braggadocio and let them hear him in English. For anyone who can’t speak it, Adriano Celentano recorded this song in 1972 to show what it sounds like.

At that point Celentano was already a big star in Italy, where he gained fame in the late ’50s with an act inspired by – I’m not making this up – Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. He made both records and movies, so if you can imagine Presley as a comic lead, or Lewis as a rock ‘n’ roller, you’ve got the right picture.

He loved American music, but was frustrated by his inability to speak English. “So at a certain point, because I like American slang – which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian – I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.”

Celentano said he was thinking by the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, so he was a bit dismayed that it was viewed as a novelty song. The fact that it became an international hit probably soothed his ego; ironically, it caught on in other countries before it became a hit in Italy. The song has been used in several American movies and television shows, most recently “Ted Lasso.” The video comes from an Italian TV show the year it made the charts.

In Italy, Celentano is known for a lot more than his danceable novelty tune. He’s had a long career singing all sorts of music. He even recorded this 1977 tune in English by learning the lyrics phonetically.